Bill Clinton: Hillary will learn from failed run

Sep. 29, 2013
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Hillary and Bill Clinton / Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images

by David Jackson, USA TODAY

by David Jackson, USA TODAY

If Hillary Rodham Clinton decides to run for president in 2016, her next campaign "will be better," her husband says.

"It'll be different," former president Bill Clinton told ABC's This Week. "Whether she's in it or not, they're all different."

The former president added: "The main thing you can't do, the great trick in any human endeavor, including politics, is you must learn the lessons of your mistakes and your failures without becoming a general who fights the last war, because every new encounter will be shaped by different forces."

While careful to say that former secretary of State Clinton hasn't decided whether to run in 2016, Bill Clinton said her loss to President Obama in the 2008 Democratic Party was partly the product of "complicated" circumstances.

"You had two extraordinarily gifted people with great political skills, particularly President Obama," Clinton told ABC News. "He'd been in more races than Hillary had, by far. Her first primary election in her life was the presidential primary of 2008."

Hillary Clinton won two races for the U.S. Senate from New York with fairly little competition.

Obama won a primary before his first (and only) Senate election in 2004. He had lost a Democratic primary for the U.S. House in 2000. The rest of his campaign experience was for the state Legislature in Illinois.